Rolland's "Christophe" is without doubt the most remarkable book that
has appeared in Europe since Nietzsche's "Ecce Homo."
It is a profoundly suggestive treatise upon the relations between art
and life. It contains a deep and heroic philosophy--the philosophy of
the worship of the mysterious life-force as God; and of the reaching
out beyond the turmoil of good and evil towards some vast and dimly
articulated reconciliation. Since "Wilhelm Meister" no book has been
written more valuable as an intellectual ladder to the higher levels
of æsthetic thought and feeling.
Massive and dramatic, powerful and suggestive, it magnetizes us into
an acceptance of its daring and optimistic hopes for the world; of its
noble suggestions of a spiritual synthesis of the opposing
race-traditions of Europe. Of all the books mentioned in this list it
is the one which the compiler would most strongly recommend to the
notice of those anxious to win a firmer intellectual standing-ground.
40. GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO. THE FLAME OF LIFE. THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH.
_Translated by Arthur Hornblow_.
D'Annunzio is the most truly Italian, the most inveterately Latin, of
all recent writers. Without light and shade, without "nuance,"
without humor or irony, he compels our attention by the clear-cut,
monumental images he projects, by the purple and scarlet splendor of
his imperial dreams.
His philosophy, though lacking in the deep and tragic imagination of
Nietzsche, has something of the Nietzschean intellectual fury. He
teaches a shameless and antinomian hedonism, narrower, less humane,
but more fervid and emotional, than that taught by Remy de Gourmont.
In "The Triumph of Death" we find a fierce smoldering voluptuousness,
expressed with a hard and brutal realism which recalls the frescoes on
the walls of ancient Pompeii. In "The Flame of Life" we have in superb
rhetoric the most colored and ardent description of Venice to be found
in all literature. Perhaps the finest passage he ever wrote is that
account of the speech of the Master of Life in the Doge's Palace with
its incomparable eulogy upon Veronese and its allusion to Pisanello's
head of Sigismondo Malatesta.
42. DOSTOIEVSKY. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. THE IDIOT. THE BROTHERS
KARAMAZOV. THE INSULTED AND INJURED. THE POSSESSED. _Translated by
Constance Garnett and published by Macmillan. Other translations in
Everyman's Library_.
Dostoievsky is the greatest and most racial of all Russian writers. He
is the subtlest psychologist in fiction. As an artist he has a dark
and sombre intensity and an imaginative vehemence only surpassed by
Shakespeare. As a philosopher he anticipates Nietzsche in the
direction of his insight, though in his conclusions he is
diametrically opposite. He teaches that out of weakness, abnormality,
perversity, foolishness, desperation, abandonment, and a morbid
pleasure in humiliation, it is possible to arrive at high and
unutterable levels of spiritual ecstasy. His ideal is sanctity--not
morality--and his revelations of the impassioned and insane motives of
human nature--its instinct towards self-destruction for instance--will
never be surpassed for their terrible and convincing truth.
The strange Slavophil dream of the regeneration of the world by the
power of the Russian soul and the magic of the "White Christ who comes
out of Russia" could not be more arrestingly expressed than in these
passionate and extraordinary works of art.
47. TURGENIEV. VIRGIN SOIL. A SPORTSMAN'S SKETCHES. _Translated by
Constance Garnett. And "Lisa" in Everyman's Library_.
Turgeniev is by far the most "artistic" as he is the most
disillusioned and ironical of Russian writers. With a tender poetical
delicacy, almost worthy of Shakespeare, he sketches his appealing
portraits of young girls. His style is clear--objective--winnowed and
fastidious. He has certain charming old-fashioned weaknesses--as for
instance his trick of over-emphasizing the differences between his bad
and good characters; but there is a clear-cut distinction, and a lucid
charm about his work that reminds one of certain old crayon drawings
or certain delicate water-color sketches. His allusions to natural
scenery are always introduced with peculiar appropriateness and are
never permitted to dominate the dramatic element of the story as
happens so often in other writers.
There is a sad and tender vein of unobtrusive moralizing running
through his work but one is conscious that at bottom he is profoundly
pessimistic and disenchanted. The gaiety of Turgeniev is winning and
unforced; his sentiment natural and never "staled or rung upon." The
pensive detachment of a sensitive and yet not altogether unworldly
spirit seems to be the final impression evoked by his books.